Literacy and Literature: priorities in English studies towards 2000.

Part of book or chapter of bookEnglishOPEN

Durant, Alan
(1995)

Publisher: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Through discussion of a changing and unstable relationship between concepts of 'literacy' and 'literature', this chapter outlines problems of aims and content in university-level English studies, and speculates about future challenges. A historically changing balance is traced between social skills of language use and interpretation (often dismissed as merely 'instrumental') and concern with a body of literature whose fostering of moral and aesthetic values is sometimes deemed essential to national belonging or a sense of being cultured. The view is presented that English studies needs, far more than at present [1995], to integrate linguistic, literary, and media work rather than prioritising any one of these strands or teaching all three, but independently of one another.